and Yu the Great, the ruler who was too busy controlling flood waters to enter his own house when he passed it. We can add Kua Fu, the man who chased the sun. Their daring to battle against any challenges and even Heaven are encouragements for the Chinese to advance indomitably to construct a better country.
Secondly, an anti-invasion and anti-tyranny spirit. When the peasant Chen Sheng, as we have seen, for the first time in China’s history roared out his determination to revolt against a tyrannical government, thousands of people followed him and soon ended the seemingly formidable Qin dynasty. His question to the crowd, “Are ministers and generals born a superior breed?” resonates through history until today.
Thirdly, sacrifices of individual property and life. With a mere 10,000 poorly-equipped soldiers, Tang dynasty general Zhang Xun (born in Dengzheng), ←xvii | xviii→already mentioned above, defended Suiyang city for ten months against a well-provided army of 100,000 soldiers led by the traitor An Lushan. After the city was finally broken into, Zhang Xun, together with the last 36 soldiers, refused to surrender, whereupon they were put to death. The famous writer Han Yu (768–824 A.D.) recorded his execution scene: “Not a slice of fear or nervousness showed in him.” Zhang Xun’s way of facing death unflinchingly symbolizes honor.
Fourthly, hatred of evil and restoration of justice. Song dynasty politician and judge Bao Zheng (999–1062 A.D.) was well known for his impartiality. He enforced the law strictly, staunchly, and uprightly. A poetic line “Bribery and connections won’t work, Judge Bao is King of Hell” was created and soon became popular. He became a model for ancient officials, and an idol for young scholars. Judge Bao’s upright, unyielding, and impartial way of conducting law is a legacy which modern China’s officials, especially judges, cherish and of which they feel proud.
Fifthly, the pride of joining the battlefield and dying for the nation. The legendary Northern and Southern dynasty woman Hua Mulan (purported to have been born in Yu Cheng) put on male clothes to enable her to join the army when her father was too aged for the battlefield. We have already met with two further honorable leaders: Song dynasty General Yue Fei, at a critical moment for saving the nation from being destroyed, swore to regain the land occupied by the kingdom Jin, and repeatedly defeated enemy troops that were themselves famous for brilliant battlefield performances. His poem The River All Red, which is full of daring, has been passed on from generation to generation. Ming dynasty official Shi Kefa, without military supplies or relief troops, defended Yangzhou city against an invading Qing army until the last minute of his life. Reading their stories, our hearts are filled with inspiring thoughts and emotions, and we are motivated to advance bravely. The sense of honor reflected in such stories is a valuable part of Chinese culture and the Chinese national spirit.
Honor is an eternal topic. Different histories have shaped different conceptions of it. Therefore, each culture has its unique sense of honor, and has different hero/heroine images. Cultures in the East and cultures in the West are different, as are religions. Such differences have a foundation in reality. There have been single-handed fighters and individualistic heroes in China, but in traditional Chinese culture they are not the mainstream; Western cultures admire heroes and cherish honor, while Western heroism appears more in individuals, similar to “Xia Ke” (侠客, similar to knight-errant) in China’s tradition. This is a certain cultural difference. Therefore, a book that highlights the keyword “honor” and centers on comparative culture studies in the East and in the West – like this book – is of great value. The research methodology of this book ←xviii | xix→is representative in contemporary cultural studies, as conceived by British cultural study researcher Raymond Williams. The authors Mine Krause, Yan Sun, and Michael Steppat have been doing research in the field for years, they have similar experiences in knowledge structure and education, while they are from different cultural and academic backgrounds. This book is thus a perfect platform for intercultural studies, as it extends the study of “honor” to a new sphere and expands the readers’ scholarly insight. I strongly recommend this book, and am very happy to have the chance of writing a Foreword to it.
MA Chi
Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences
←xix | xx→←0 | 1→
CROSS CULTURAL COMMUNICATION
Edited by Prof. Dr. Dr. Dr. h.c. Ernest W. B. Hess-Lüttich
VOL. 34
Self-worth is not always and not necessarily a good thing. To be sure, it is appealing from a post-materialist perspective. It is somewhat uplifting to think that the fountainhead of international relations is not so much lust for power (animus dominandi) or the pursuit of gain (homo oeconomicus) but rather the striving for self-worth. In reality, the struggle for recognition brings out not only the best but also the worst in people. (Jörg Friedrichs, 2016)
Honor-related values are strongly divisive. They are not only a source of inequality, but of violence all the way to murder. Without claiming to exhaust the social or legal dimensions, we can define violence as gender-based, hence as “discrimination that seriously inhibits women’s ability to enjoy rights and freedoms on a basis of equality with men,” including “acts that inflict physical, mental or sexual harm or suffering, threats of such acts, coercion and other deprivations of liberty” (see Convention, General Recommendation 19, in 1992). The Human Rights Watch Oral Intervention (see Item 12, in 2001) focuses especially on honor-related murder in this context: “Honor crimes are acts of violence, usually murder, committed by male family members against female family members who are perceived to have brought dishonor upon the family.”6 Yet that is too narrow to cover the scope of discriminatory acts; Robert Oprisko meaningfully points to the Face conception when he speaks of crimes of honor as including slander, assault, and battery (80–81). An awareness that these grim phenomena deserve investigation gives us the first motivation for our topic. We intend to use a pragmatic understanding of Honor and of Face, which we will explain in each of the respective sections below.
←1 | 2→
In principle, the term “honor” can have various meanings, including notions of dignity, loyalty, and honesty. Yet in many parts of the world, in so-called honor cultures which are traditionally located in parts of the Middle East, Mediterranean regions of Greece, Italy, and Spain, South America, and North Africa, honor is often seen in terms of women’s assigned sexual and familial roles as dictated by traditional family ideology. For this reason, a direct link between male reputation and the female body can be observed in such cultural contexts, creating a gap between a woman’s and a man’s honor by setting double standards. What happens here is not just a matter of geography: in our multicultural world, such values can now also be traced in some parts of the so-called West. They are of growing and disruptive concern, as they clash with legal norms that are difficult to implement, and have become the target of divisive security policies, as shown in the U.S. presidential “Executive Order 13780” Initial Section 11 Report of January 2018. It includes the finding that few statistics on honor killings are available at a federal level, but also provides the following information: “Based on a representative sample studied through open media sources, 91 percent of the victims in honor killings in North America were murdered for being ‘too westernized’ ” (8). Some “glaring ironies” of the executive order were previously picked apart in the political dispute (see Milani).
Face cultures share certain features with honor cultures.7
